Assembling IKEA Furniture Will Make You Question Your Whole Relationship

Fact: you will fucking hate your partner if you assemble a piece of IKEA furniture together. Everyone knows this. Now, experts are confirming a trip to the retail giant will determine how much stress your relationship can handle. Basically, skip the couples therapy and purchase and assemble a 42-piece IKEA armoire.

Psychologist Ramani Durvasula told The Wall Street Journal, “The store literally becomes a map of a relationship nightmare.” She said she often “tasks couples with putting together a large piece of furniture at home and reporting back on how it went.”

IKEA is not loving that their brand has become synonymous with fighting partners. A spokesman from IKEA told The Huffington Post: “Customers can easily prepare pre-visit by going to our website and viewing the IKEA catalog and catalog app. Then when in our store, couples, can have a bite to eat or a drink in our restaurant and talk through their choices. When they’ve made their decision, they can choose from several service options to make the final process easy. This includes IKEA picking the choice items, picking and delivering or a combo of three; picking, delivering and assembling. All these choices attribute to having a great IKEA shopping experience.”

Hahaha – WHAT? I don’t care how many Swedish meatballs you consume together, unless one of those yellow-and-blue-clad, helpful employees is following you home to assemble that SPROCKEN or whatever the hell you just bought, you are going to fight. The fighting will begin as you try to extricate yourselves from the maze that is the IKEA showroom ( I told you we should have made a left after the fake plants, asshole), and it will continue as you attempt to shove the eight-foot-long, thousand pound box (that is somehow supposed to magically become your new entertainment center) into your trunk. Just wait until you open the instruction manual that doesn’t contain a single word. One of you will definitely be crying.

If you’re considering putting your relationship to the test by assembling one of these pieces, here’s a handy guide to help you decide where you should start.

MOLGER step stool

Difficulty level: novice

Instruction manual length: 8 pages

Thoughts upon completion: High five!

NORNAS bench

Difficulty level: beginner

Instruction manual length: 16 pages

Thoughts upon completion: There was a brief moment when he was looking at the instruction manual when I thought, “Why is this so hard for you? There are no words. You don’t even need to be literate to follow this thing.” But he finally figured out the pictures of the screws weren’t actually to scale, and restored my comfort in the idea of passing his genes on to my future children.

HEMNES 8-drawer dresser

Difficulty level: advanced

Instruction manual length: 34 pages

Thoughts upon completion: What the fuck, dude? No, they do not include “extra parts” for “back-up.” There are literally 18 screws left over and I can’t even right now. The little drawers on top are not “novelty.” They are supposed to open. I would’ve had better luck assembling this with a monkey. I need some space.

LIATORP storage unit

Images via IKEA

Difficulty level: NO

Instruction manual length: 40 pages

Thoughts upon completion: I hate your fucking face.

The only way to protect your relationship is to pay for assembly — which by the way is the best-kept secret in retail. Did you have any idea that was even an option? But that sort of defeats the purpose of buying cheap furniture.

Oh, IKEA.

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